The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men

by Stephen Jones

  “Are you all right, sir?” said Jackson, not bothering to lower his voice.

  Farrow was aware of people turning to look at him. He turned his frown into a scowl of annoyance.

  “Perfectly, thank you, Christopher. I was just thinking. You should try it some time.”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Jackson woodenly.

  Farrow glared at Jackson just long enough to re-assert his questionable authority, and then turned to a fussy-looking man in white coat and skin-tight latex gloves, who had been hovering around the body like an albino vulture.

  “What’s your verdict this time, Doctor Quinn?” he asked.

  The little man looked unhappy. “It’s all very perplexing, Detective Inspector, very perplexing indeed. Same m.o. as the others, of course, which means that she could have died from any one of a number of injuries. It appears – just like the others – that the killer came at her in a frenzy, rendered her unconscious and probably even killed her before she had a chance to fight back. Whoever this man is, he’s got tremendous strength. I only wish I could determine what type of weapon or weapons he uses.”

  “Any new ideas?” asked Farrow.

  The pathologist pulled a face. “Not really. As before, the injuries are ragged, so it isn’t a blade, unless it’s a very jagged, very uneven one. If pushed, I’d guess that he’s using something like . . . like a rake-head, but much sturdier, much more compact, more lethal. It might be worth checking locally whether anyone’s had some kind of . . . metal claw or unusual tool built recently. I know it’s a long shot, but . . .” He shrugged.

  “Yes, I think that particular investigation is already under way. Christopher?”

  “No results so far, sir,” said Jackson smoothly.

  “And the killer left nothing behind? No hairs, no footprints, no stray buttons with bits of thread attached?”

  The pathologist offered a watery smile. “Nothing at all, which again is unusual, although as I say, the girl died before she could fight back.”

  “Okay.” Farrow sighed. “Well, give me a shout when you’re ready to do the post-mortem. I’ll try to pop along for the matinee.” He took a grubby handkerchief from his pocket and used it to dab beads of sweat from his forehead. Quietly he said, “Let’s leave the good doctor to his work, Sergeant.”

  Outside the tent, Farrow breathed in the icy air for a moment and watched uniformed constables ranging about the yard, searching painstakingly for evidence. They looked as though they were helping a colleague search for a lost contact lens. The thought prompted a snigger, which he barely managed to stifle. He saw Jackson looking at him curiously and made an over-elaborate show of clearing his throat as he attempted to pull his thoughts together.

  Procedure, he thought. What needs to be done? “Who have we spoken to so far, Christopher?”

  “Sir?” said Jackson, who was making the word sound increasingly like a weary, puzzled rebuke.

  “Who have we spoken to? In detail, I mean. The landlord, the boyfriend? Who found the body?”

  Farrow clamped his lips together, aware that he was beginning to bluster. Jackson’s face remained dead-pan.

  “A Mrs Esther Norwood, wife of the man who owns the yard, found the body, sir, at 6.15 a.m. She says she came in early to sort out some orders.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “She’s sitting outside in a panda with Constable Butlin, sir, having a cup of tea.”

  “Very cosy.”

  Jackson turned his steely gaze on his superior. “She was very upset, sir. As you can imagine.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course, she must have been,” said Farrow, somewhat cowed.

  “As for the boyfriend, sir, PC Platt and WPC Munro are with him at the moment. He was very upset too. The landlord of The Crow’s Nest, a Mr David Smithers, has only been spoken to briefly, sir, so far.”

  “And was he also upset?”

  Jackson’s expression seemed to indicate that he found Farrow’s attempts at humour tiresome. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Right,” said Farrow, trying to sound and look purposeful. “Well, I think I’ll go and have a chat with our Mr Smithers, and from there move on to some of his regulars, see if any of them heard or saw anything or anyone unusual in the pub last night. What I want you to do, Sergeant, is to get statements from the boyfriend and Mrs . . . the woman who found the body . . .”

  “Mrs Norwood, sir.”

  “That’s right: Mrs Norwood. Then I want you to trace the driver of the bus that Miss Springer would have caught last night, and as many of the passengers as you can, and find out what you can from them.”

  “That’s already being done, sir,” said Jackson smugly.

  “Is it? Good. Well then, I’ll leave you to it. Perhaps we can rendezvous at the p.m. later? Buzz me when the doctor’s ready for us, will you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jackson with an icy patience that bordered on the facetious.

  “Oh, and Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Smarten yourself up a bit, will you? Your tie’s crooked.”

  Jackson had raised his hand to his throat before he saw Farrow’s grin replicated on the faces of almost everyone else in the yard. As the Detective Inspector turned and ambled away, he wondered whether the reddening of Jackson’s face was a blush of embarrassment or a flush of rage.

  I admit to him that I’m scared. I ask: Will it hurt?

  He moves inside me. Pain is nothing, he says. Think of it as life. As re-birth. Who would not die for that?

  His words confuse me. I feel so tired. How much longer? I ask him. How much longer before it’s over?

  Not long, he whispers, not long now. Do you not remember?

  No, I tell him. No, I remember nothing.

  He whispers inside me: It is strange how one forgets.

  Jackson switched off the computer and pushed himself back in his seat. His spine crackled; his shoulders felt as if someone were pressing down on them from above. He looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven-fifteen. He’d told Janice he’d try to be home by ten. She’d promised to have a turkey curry on the table by ten-thirty, and then something even spicier for him afterwards.

  He thought of how he’d kissed her wicked smile goodbye as he’d slipped from between the sheets after receiving the call at half past six that morning. He thought of her warm softness, her tousled hair, the thick sleepy perfumed smell of her. Then he thought of the dead girl, her stomach ripped open, her face gone, the hot stink of her scattered organs. As he reached for the phone, he felt a cold steel pulse of angry determination. I’ll get you, you vicious bastard, he promised silently, punching in his number.

  “Hello?” said Janice, sounding tired or wary.

  “Love, it’s me. I’m really sorry I’m not home yet. I’ve been tied up with paperwork at the station for the past two hours.”

  “Chris!” she said, and this time there was definitely relief in her voice, which then dropped an octave. “I was starting to get worried.”

  “I know, love, I’m really sorry. Time just got away from me. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

  “I heard about that poor girl on the news. Was it awful?”

  She was not being ghoulish, Jackson knew. She was just concerned about what he had to expose himself to every day.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly, “it was pretty bad. Listen, Jan, I’ll try not to be too much longer, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll keep your dinner warm for you. That’s if you haven’t already eaten?”

  “I had a doughnut about eleven this morning, and I’ve drunk more coffee than my bladder can cope with.”

  She tutted. “Well, that’s not very good, is it? You sound really tired.”

  “I’m utterly shagged,” said Jackson, though it was only now that he was realizing it. “It’s been all hell on today. Not that you’d think so looking at our D.I.”

  “Is he still not pulling his weight?”

  “He turned up an hour after everyone el
se this morning looking like something the cat dragged in, spent most of his day in the pub, showed up briefly at the post mortem and then sloped off home about six.”

  He convinced himself he wasn’t exaggerating all that much as Janice said, “You really ought to report him, Chris. It’s not fair that you get all his work to do as well as your own. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is.”

  “Yeah,” said Jackson vaguely. “Anyway, that’s not your problem. I’ll see you later.”

  He sat with his hand on the phone for a minute or so after putting it down and wondered whether in fact he was being unfair to Farrow, and if so to what degree. In Jackson’s eyes the Detective Inspector seemed to be stumbling through much of this investigation as if sleepwalking, but did he really lack the urgency, the drive, the commitment that Jackson saw as essential to the job, or was it simply that he was older and wiser and thus favoured a calmer, more methodical approach? Could Jackson’s problems with the D.I. simply be put down to a clash of personalities? The Detective Sergeant was aware that there were still plenty of good coppers within the station, particularly among the old guard, who held faith with Farrow and his methods, who indeed resented his own dynamism, saw him as little more than an upstart, too clever for his own good, still wet behind the ears.

  And yet it wasn’t as though Jackson hated his superior officer, or even wanted to oust him to aid his own career, as Farrow seemed to think; what got to him was the simple fact that the man was so bloody sloppy. Had he always been like this – passing the buck, failing to meet appointments, wandering around looking like death warmed over? Was it simply the high profile nature of this case that was highlighting deficiencies that Farrow had previously been able to cover up? It certainly seemed as though the strain of the investigation was taking a physical toll on the older man. Admittedly Farrow had always had a face like a bag of spanners, but now his skin was grey and blotchy, his eyes bloodshot, his shoulders stooped. In truth he looked broken, defeated, which was hardly surprising after five unsolved murders, and precious few leads, in less than a month. Perhaps it would be kinder if Farrow was pensioned off, as one or two people in the department seemed to think. Otherwise he might end up dropping down dead on the job.

  Jackson let his gaze wander to the incident board that had been set up on the far side of the room. It covered the whole of one wall and was intended to inspire him and his colleagues to greater efforts, to sting and harry them into catching the bastard who had reduced a quiet, community-minded Northern town into a dark arena of terror and hostility and suspicion. Jackson found it hard to believe that even now, even after what had happened, even after repeated police warnings that young women should not go out alone at night, there were still those who ignored the advice; who seemed to hold the blinkered view that violent death happened to other people, or who insisted that no man, no matter how much of a maniac he was, was going to dictate where they could and couldn’t go.

  Jackson sympathized with the sentiment, but he couldn’t condone it. Yesterday, however, he had come down very hard on a young PC who he’d overheard telling a colleague in the locker room that as far as he was concerned any woman walking on her own at night deserved whatever was coming to her. Jackson had given the boy the whole bit about how it was up to people like him to ensure that the streets were safe for anyone to walk anywhere at any time, and if he didn’t share that opinion then he was in the wrong bloody profession! However to be truthful, although he had made the bollocking sound convincing enough, his heart hadn’t really been in it. In many ways he could understand the boy’s attitude, the frustration behind it. It was just symptomatic of the low morale that was creeping through the station like a dose of flu.

  Five women. All young, all pretty, all torn apart in quiet dark places in the dead of night without, it seemed, even having time to scream or raise so much as a finger in defence. Their celluloid faces gazed back at Jackson from the incident board, their frozen smiles turning seemingly more mocking each day. If there was any chink in the killer’s armour at all – whom local and now national newspapers had gleefully dubbed “The Wolfman” – it was that his blood-lust seemed to be increasing; the gaps between his murders were getting less and less. It was surely only a matter of time before the sheer frenzy of his desires led to him making a mistake. But how many more women would be killed in the meantime? How many more photographs would have to be tacked to the incident board?

  Jackson groaned and pushed himself to his feet. Despite the caffeine still buzzing in the back of his skull like an electricity pylon, he felt utterly wasted. The station was quiet, the office in semi-darkness. He lifted his jacket from the back of his chair, and yawned so hugely that his jawbone cracked.

  The telephone rang. Janice again probably, telling him that the curry was bubbling on the stove and a couple of poppadoms warming under the grill. He picked up the receiver.

  “Moorfield Police Station. Detective Sergeant Jackson speaking.”

  The man on the other end of the line either had laryngitis or was disguising his voice.

  “I need to see you,” he rasped.

  Instinctively Jackson thought: This is it. A shudder of anticipation passed through him. He shed his fatigue like snake-skin and was all at once alert.

  “What about?” he asked tentatively, wishing there was someone in the office with him who he could mime at to trace the call.

  “No time for . . . games,” hissed the caller, sounding as though he was in pain, as though he was finding it difficult to talk. “I want you to meet me. I . . . I want you to come alone. Don’t bring anyone with you, otherwise . . . otherwise your last chance . . . will be gone.”

  Jackson felt a pulse beating in his throat, but his voice was steady. “Why should I want to meet you at all?” he said.

  The caller groaned as if in pain. When he next spoke his voice was weaker than ever, almost inaudible. “You’ve been . . . looking for me . . . I’m the Wolfman. I killed another one tonight. I want it to be the . . . the last one. The last one ever.”

  The pulse was really hammering now. Jackson swallowed. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  “I tear them open . . . from stomach to throat,” the caller wheezed. “I take their faces.”

  Jackson went cold. This information had not appeared in the newspapers. “Why should you want to meet me?” he said.

  “Need to talk to you. Need you to . . . to . . .” The voice tailed off.

  “You know I can’t meet you alone,” Jackson said.

  “Has to be. Alone . . . or not at all. No tricks. I’ll know. Please believe me . . .”

  Jackson thought hard, and in the end said, “Okay. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Old railway station . . . Be there in . . . ten minutes. If you’re not, I’ll know you’ve . . . arranged reinforcements, and your . . . last chance will . . . be gone . . .”

  There was a clatter and a buzz.

  “Wait!” called Jackson, but he was already speaking to a dead line.

  I feel him growing inside me, stretching me. I feel myself dwindling. He pleads with me, howls at me, curses me, but I remain silent in the hope I can preserve my strength.

  We are the same, he tells me, wheedling. Soon we shall be renewed. Together we may seem divided, but divided we will come together.

  I try not to listen to him, but his words are part of me. I cannot block them out.

  Finally I react. I say to him: There will be no more killing. Six lives for my one cannot be justified.

  It is the price of survival, he says.

  The railway link between Moorfield and its neighbours had been severed, despite vigorous local opposition, back in the mid-seventies. Oddly, however, the station building itself had never been pulled down or even converted into offices or shops, but instead had fallen into disrepair over the years, become prey to vandals and weeds and harsh weather. Situated at the edge of a newish industrial estate, it was a lonely place, retaining a sense of sad
nostalgia by day and an atmosphere of brooding eeriness when darkness set in.

  The pulse in Jackson’s throat was still beating ten minutes after speaking to the man who claimed to be the Wolfman, and quickened as he pulled in to the station car park, which was rutted, and infested with clumps of spiny grass. The car headlights lurched over a long rectangular building with crumbling, grime-blackened stonework, boarded windows and doors, sagging drainpipes and rusting lamp standards. When Jackson brought the car to a halt and switched the headlights off, these details winked out as if only the light had created them. Now the terrain was simpler, albeit instantly more treacherous. Beneath a night sky freckled with stars, the building had become a block of impenetrable darkness.

  For a minute or so the young Sergeant remained in his car, breathing long and deep, clenching and unclenching his hands. Calm down, he urged himself silently, and began to chant the instruction in his head like a mantra: calm down, calm down, calm down. There was no stopping the adrenalin surging through his body, but he wanted to be controlling it as much as possible when he went in there. If the killer was going to be waiting for him, as he had promised, then the next half-hour or so would almost certainly be the most crucial of his career, if not his life.

  At last he was ready. He opened the car door and stepped out into a biting cold wind. His legs were shaking, but not too much. He swallowed to control the juddering in his stomach as he reached into his overcoat pocket and took out a torch which he turned on after a moment’s hesitation. Holding the torch made him feel conspicuous, but Jackson reasoned that if the killer was here, then he could hardly expect him to be unaware of his arrival.

  The torch beam ballooning before him, he walked through a stone arch into the body of the station, past the cobweb-strewn ticket-windows and deserted newspaper stall on his right, and the tea bar on his left, which was now nothing more than an empty black space. His senses were so attuned that grit seemed to detonate beneath his feet; his breath, slow and steady though it was, seemed to fill the air around him as though it was the building that was breathing. The inside of the station was like a black tunnel containing many crevices in which a killer might hide. Shadows seemed to loll and nod just beyond the range of his torch light as he walked forward. His head moved from side to side as if jerked by his flickering eyes.